Sky-high gasoline prices getting you down? A major energy alternative is fast approaching—sooner than many people think.
That hopeful but fact-based news came Thursday to The Rotary Club of McMinnville, where Dr Stephen A. Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE) was the guest speaker.
While gasoline and diesel prices have climbed down from their punishing highs last summer, no one can say there won’t be another round, or repeated rounds, of painful surges in energy costs as foreign oil cartels and domestic petroleum giants grab for fatter profits.
Carbon-free energy independence is not only a huge benefit to the environment and the health of air-breathing animals, but it also helps the bottom line for businesses, governments and individuals, Smith emphasized.
As the costs of photovoltaics (solar panels) and wind turbines have plunged in the last decade, a future of carbon-free energy production is much more realistic, he explained. In fact, the world’s embrace of clean energy from the sun and wind is accelerating “faster than people imagined.”
At the same time, the alternative — burning more fossil fuel with century-old technology — is driving the planet toward a perilous and unsustainable scenario as global warming accelerates. He pointed to the increasing intensity and frequency of destructive weather, wildfires ravaging broad swaths of American woodlands and the “drying up of the Mississippi River and the Colorado River” as results of soaring heat.
“I am absolutely convinced that human activity is impacting the environment,” the speaker affirmed. “The No. 1 driver is emissions from (burning) carbon fuels.”
Just one piece of evidence is ice cores from ancient glaciers. For millions of years before the coal-fueled Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, the ratio of carbon dioxide remained relatively low and very steady as a fraction of the Earth’s atmospheric gases. Since then, the CO2 content has soared, trapping more heat like a blanket wrapped around our planet.
“We can’t just ignore it. Some people say it costs too much to fix” the carbon emissions problem. “Actually, it costs too much not to fix it.”
Though an occasional critic of the Tennessee Valley Authority as a “laggard” in adopting sustainable energy technology, SACE has noted the public utility’s recent moves to replace aging coal plants with natural gas generation. While it’s still a fossil fuel, natural gas produces less CO2 and other pollutants, per unit of electricity generated than coal, Smith said.
Nevertheless, TVA urgently needs to accelerate its adoption of technologies that harness the unlimited, inexhaustible, non-polluting and essentially free energy from the sun and wind, he urged.
In a McMinnville Public Radio interview recording after his Rotary talk, Smith cited another Southern power giant — Florida Light and Power — that has committed to build solar farms that will generate approximately three times the total output of the TVA. Most of that “green power” will go to homes and businesses, but another large fraction will be used in a pollution-free process for stripping hydrogen from water.
And why do we need more hydrogen? That’s one more source of carbon-free, non-polluting and sustainable energy, Smith concluded.
That interview will air on McMinnville Public Radio 91.3-WCPI Tuesday at 5 p.m.; Wednesday, 5 a.m.; Thursday, 1 a.m.; and Friday at 1 a.m.
